Tim O'Brien > Quotes

“As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“But the lieutenant knew that in war purpose is never paramount, neither purpose nor cause, and that battles are always fought among human beings, not purposes. He could not imagine dying for a purpose. Death was its own purpose, no qualification or restraint. He did not celebrate war. He did not believe in glory.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Ölebilecek adamların bütün duygusal yükünü taşırlardı. Elem, dehşet, sevgi, özlem - soyut şeylerdi bunlar, fakat soyut şeylerin de somut bir ağırlığı vardı. Utanç verici anılar taşırlardı. Zor zapt edilen korkaklıkların ortak sırrını taşırlardı, kaçma veya donup kalma ya da gizlenme içgüdüsü ve pek çok açıdan yüklerin en ağırıydı bu, çünkü hiçbir zaman sırtından indiremezdin, mükemmel bir denge ve duruş gerektirirdi. Onurlarını taşırlardı. Bir askerin en büyük utancını taşırlardı, yüz kızarıklığını. Öldürür ve ölürlerdi, çünkü bunu yapmasalar utanırlardı. Savaşta bu yüzden vardılar zaten, olumlu hiçbir şey yoktu, ne düş, ne görkem ne de onur; onursuzluğun yüz kızarıklığı olmasın yeter ki. Utançtan ölmemek için ölürlerdi. Sürünerek tünellere girer, ateş altında ilerlemeye devam ederlerdi. Her sabah, bütün belirsizliğe rağmen, bacaklarını harekete zorlarlardı. Dayanırlardı. Sırtlamayı sürdürürlerdi. O aşikar seçeneğe teslim olmazlar, gözlerini kapatıp yere düşmezlerdi. O kadar kolaydı, gerçekten. Kendini yere bırak, kaslarının gevşemesine izin ver, konuşma ve kankaların seni, yerden kalkıp havalandıktan sonra burnunu indirip ileri atılarak uzağa, dünyaya götürecek helikoptere yükleyinceye kadar hiç kımıldama. Kendini yere atmaya bakardı, ama kimse yere atmazdı kendini. Cesaret değildi tam olarak; amaç kahramanlık değildi. Korkak olamayacak kadar korkmalarıydı nedeni daha çok.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“We find truth inside, or not at all.”
― Tim O'Brien

“Upstairs, I mean. It takes brains. You have to explain some hard stuff, like why people die, or why God invented pneumonia and all that.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The average age in our platoon, I'd guess, was nineteen or twenty, and as a consequence things often took on a curiously playful atmosphere, like a sporting event at some exotic reform school. The competition could be lethal, yet there was a childlike exuberance to it all, lots of pranks and horseplay. Like when Azar blew away Ted Lavender's puppy. 'What's everybody so upset about?' Azar said. 'I mean, Christ, I'm just a boy.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The thing about a story is that you dream as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to move the spirits in the head.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“In a way, maybe, I’d gone under with Kiowa, and now after two decades I’d finally worked my way out. A hot afternoon, a bright August sun, and the war was over.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“We'll find new stuff to want.”
― Tim O'Brien

“They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture”
― Tim O'Brien

“It is important to be faithful to your values and to your opinions, but remember that your opinions are opinions. And remember that your values may reorganize themselves over time.”
― Tim O'Brien, Dad's Maybe Book

“I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology.”
― Tim O'Brien, Tomcat in Love

“It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Finally one of his buddies asks what happened with the nurse, why so hot for combat, and the guy says, 'All that peace, man, it felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“We all need our fantasies, Angie. Even you. Harps and halos. Life everlasting. UFOs and laced Kool-Aid and Prince Charming zooming us off to paradise. Everybody on earth—we trade in reality for whatever keeps us going.” “You’re defending deceit?” “No, I’m describing it.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“My job title, I believe, was Declotter.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“A few months back, Meredith and I took our sons to an evening of modern dance. It was an outdoor performance, in a horse paddock on a ranch in central Texas, and the dance involved nine young women and a very large horse. There was a great deal of spinning in the dirt. There was swift running, much kicking, many horse-like movements of the head and shoulders. It was strange and very beautiful. At one point, midway through the performance, Meredith leaned over to Timmy and asked if he understood what the dancing was all about. Timmy said no. Meredith said, “Well, right now, for instance, that dancer over there, she’s like a baby horse—a foal—trying to stand up for the first time. Can you see that?” Timmy nodded. He looked puzzled. “Well, yes,” he said, “but what about all the other shenanigans?”
― Tim O'Brien, Dad's Maybe Book

“I feared ridicule and censure.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The fabulous and the fantastic—the wildly outlandish lies—were typically questioned by the intellect yet wholly absorbed by the heart. Almost always, mythomaniacs lied to reinforce fragile egos, decorating their lives with unearned grandeur.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Stories are for joining the past and the future. Stories are for those late hours of the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when
there is nothing to remember except the story.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha's letters. Then he burned the two photographs.”
― Tim O'Brien

“His brain had the bends.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“During that long summer I'd been over and over the various arguments, all the pros and cons, and it was no longer a question that could be decided by an act of pure reason. Intellect had come up against emotion. My conscience told me to run, but some irrational and powerful force was resisting, like a weight pushing me toward the war. What it came down to, stupidly, was a sense of shame. Hot, stupid shame. I did not want people to think badly of me. Not my parents, not my brother and sister, not even the folks down at the Gobbler Cafe. I was ashamed to be there at the Tip Top Lodge. I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“There are two Santa Monicas. One is a fairy tale of spangled gowns and improbable breasts and faces from the tabloids, of big money and fixed noses and strung-out voice teachers and heiresses on skateboards and even bigger big money; of movie stars you thought were dead and look dead; of terraced apartment buildings cascading down perilous yellow bluffs toward the sea; of Olympic swimmers and hip-hop hit men and impresarios of salvation and twenty-six-year-old agents backing out of deals in the lounge bar at Shutters; of yoga masters and street magicians; of porn kings and fast cars and microdosing prophets and shuck-and-jive evangelists and tattooed tycoons and considerably bigger big money; of Sudanese busboys with capped teeth and eight-by-ten glossies in their back pockets; of Ivy League panhandlers, teenage has-beens, home-run kinds in diamonds and fur coats, daughters of sultans, sons of felons, widows of the silver screen, and the kind of meaningless big money that has forgotten what money is.

There is that.

But start at the pier and head southeast until you reach a neighborhood of tidy, more or less identical stucco houses separated by fourteen feet of scorched grass. In a number of these homes, you will find families, or the descendants of families, who have lived here since the mid-to-late forties. For them, upscale was a Chevy in the driveway. Mom mixed up Kool-Aid at ten cents a gallon, Pop pushed used cars at a dealership off Wilshire Boulevard, Junior had a paper route, Sis did some weekend babysitting. Nowadays, the house Pop bought for $37,000 will fetch just under two million in a sluggish market, but as Pop loved to say, secretly proud "What kind of house do you buy with the profit? A pup tent? A toolshed in Laguna?”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“They would repair the leaks in their eyes.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Could this, he wondered, be I? Instantly, he congratulated himself on the impeccable grammar. Still the journalist. Still civilized, too, because what was grammar if not civilization, or the delegate of civilization, or its last decaying bulwark?”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica